Born To Run (album)
Born to Run is Bruce Springsteen's third studio album. It was released on August 25, 1975. It was also Bruce's first commercial success. Bruce spent over a year recording it, because he anticipated that Columbia Records would drop the E Street Band if Born to Run was not successful. Due to the success of the record, Bruce was featured on the covers of TIME and NEWSWEEK during the same week of October 27, 1975. He was the first rock star to do so. McPadden, Mike. "Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run: 40 Album Facts". VH1 Classic. 25 August 2015. Accessed 13 December 2016. While making the Born to Run album, one of Bruce's ideas was for the album to begin and end with different versions of "Thunder Road"; an acoustic version to open the album, and a full band version to close the album.Kirkpatrick, Rob. "The Words and Music of Bruce Springsteen". Greenwood Publishing Group. 1 January 2007. Accessed 13 December 2016. Track Listing #Thunder Road #Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out #Night #Backstreets #Born To Run #She's The One #Meeting Across The River #Jungleland Hammersmith Odeon London '75 DVD # Thunder Road # Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out # Spirit in the Night # Lost in the Flood # She's The One # Born To Run # The E Street Shuffle # It's Hard to be a Saint in the City # Backstreets # Kitty's Back # Jungleland # Rosalita (Come Out Tonight) # 4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy) # Detroit Medley # For You # Quarter to Three Unreleased Outtakes * Linda Let Me Be the One (released on Tracks) * So Young and In Love (released on Tracks) * Walking in the Street * Lonely Night in the Park * A Love So Fine * A Night Like This * Janey Needs a Shooter"Born to Run - Studio Sessions". Brucebase. 1996-2016. Accessed 13 December 2016. Jon Landau's Review NOTE: The following is a blogspot reprint of Jon Landau's Rolling Stone review of Born to Run: "This article appeared as a concert review in ''The Real Paper on May 22, 1974. Jon Landau was a music critic who also wrote for Rolling Stone. At the time, Bruce Springsteen had released two records and had gained some critical success and a moderate following, mostly through college rock stations. His label had spent a ton of money promoting him as the next Dylan but saw little in the way of commercial success. This article contains the famous quote, “I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen.” Soon afterwards Landau stopped writing for Rolling Stone and became Springsteen's manager, a position he holds to this day.'' It’s four in the morning and raining. I’m 27 today, feeling old, listening to my records, and remembering that things were diffferent a decade ago. In 1964, I was a freshman at Brandeis University, playing guitar and banjo five hours a day, listening to records most of the rest of the time, jamming with friends during the late-night hours, working out the harmonies to Beach Boys’ and Beatles’ songs. Real Paper soul writer Russell Gersten was my best friend and we would run through the 45s everyday: Dionne Warwick’s “Walk On By” and “Anyone Who Had A Heart,” the Drifters’ “Up On the Roof,” Jackie Ross’ “Selfish One,” the Marvellettes’ “Too Many Fish in the Sea,” and the one that no one ever forgets, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas’ “Heat Wave.” Later that year a special woman named Tamar turned me onto Wilson Pickett’s “Midnight Hour” and Otis Redding’s “Respect,” and then came the soul. Meanwhile, I still went to bed to the sounds of the Byrds’ “Mr. Tambourine Man” and later “Younger than Yesterday,” still one of my favorite good-night albums. I woke up to Having a Rave-Up with the Yardbirds instead of coffee. And for a change of pace, there was always bluegrass: The Stanley Brothers, Bill Monroe, and Jimmy Martin. Through college, I consumed sound as if it were the staff of life. Others enjoyed drugs, school, travel, adventure. I just liked music: listening to it, playing it, talking about it. If some followed the inspiration of acid, or Zen, or dropping out, I followed the spirit of rock’n'roll.Individual songs often achieved the status of sacraments. One September, I was driving through Waltham looking for a new apartment when the sound on the car radio stunned me. I pulled over to the side of the road, turned it up, demanded silence of my friends and two minutes and fifty-six second later knew that God had spoken to me through the Four Tops’ “Reach Out, I’ll Be There,” a record that I will cherish for as long as I live. During those often lonely years, music was my constant companion and the search for the new record was like a search for a new friend and new revelation. “Mystic Eyes” open mine to whole new vistas in white rock and roll and there were days when I couldn’t go to sleep without hearing it a dozen times.Whether it was a neurotic and manic approach to music, or just a religious one, or both, I don’t really care. I only know that, then, as now, I’m grateful to the artists who gave the experience to me and hope that I can always respond to them. The records were, of course, only part of it. In ‘65 and ‘66 I played in a band, the Jellyroll, that never made it. At the time I concluded that I was too much of a perfectionist to work with the other band members; in the end I realized I was too much of an autocrat, unable to relate to other people enough to share music with them. Realizing that I wasn’t destined to play in a band, I gravitated to rock criticism. Starting with a few wretched pieces in Broadside and then some amateurish but convincing reviews in the earliest Crawdaddy, I at least found a substitute outlet for my desire to express myself about rock: If I couldn’t cope with playing, I may have done better writing about it. But in those days, I didn’t see myself as a critic — the writing was just another extension of an all-encompassing obsession. It carried over to my love for live music, which I cared for even more than the records. I went to the Club 47 three times a week and then hunted down the rock shows — which weren’t so easy to find because they weren’t all conveniently located at downtown theatres. I flipped for the Animals’ two-hour show at Rindge Tech; the Rolling Stones, not just at Boston Garden, where they did the best half hour rock’n'roll set I had ever seen, but at Lynn Football Stadium, where they started a riot; Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels overcoming the worst of performing conditions at Watpole Skating Rink; and the Beatles at Suffolk Down, plainly audible, beautiful to look at, and confirmation that we — and I — existed as a special body of people who understood the power and the glory of rock’n'roll. I lived those days with a sense of anticipation. I worked in Briggs & Briggs a few summers and would know when the next albums were coming. The disappointment when the new Stones was a day late, the exhilaration whenAnother Side of Bob Dylan showed up a week early. The thrill of turning on WBZ and hearing some strange sound, both beautiful and horrible, but that demanded to be heard again; it turned out to be “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling,” a record that stands just behind “Reach Out I’ll Be There” as means of musical catharsis. My temperament being what it is, I often enjoyed hating as much as loving. That San Francisco shit corrupted the purity of the rock that I lvoed and I could have led a crusade against it. The Moby Grape moved me, but those songs about White Rabbits and hippie love made me laugh when they didn’t make me sick. I found more rock’n'roll in the dubbed-in hysteria on the Rolling Stones’ Got Live if You Want It than on most San Francisco albums combined. For every moment I remember there are a dozen I’ve forgotten, but I feel like they are with me on a night like this, a permanent part of my consciousness, a feeling lost on my mind but never on my soul. And then there are those individual experiences so transcendent that I can remember them as if they happened yesterday: Sam and Dave at the Soul Together at Madison Square Garden in 1967: every gesture, every movement, the order of the songs. I would give anything to hear them sing “When Something’s Wrong with My Baby” just the way they did it that night. The obsessions with Otis Redding, Jerry Butler, and B.B. King came a little bit later; each occupied six months of my time, while I digested every nuance of every album. Like the Byrds, I turn to them today and still find, when I least expect it, something new, something deeply felt, something that speaks to me.As I left college in 1969 and went into record production I started exhausting my seemingly insatiable appetite. I felt no less intensely than before about certain artists; I just felt that way about fewer of them. I not only became more discriminating but more indifferent. I found it especially hard to listen to new faces. I had accumulated enough musical experience to fall back on when I needed its companionship but during this period in my life I found I needed music less and people, whom I spend too much of my life ignoring, much more. Today I listen to music with a certain measure of detachment. I’m a professional and I make my living commenting on it. There are months when I hate it, going through the routine just as a shoe salesman goes through his. I follow films with the passion that music once held for me. But in my own moments of greatest need, I never give up the search for sounds that can answer every impulse, consume all emotion, cleanse and purify — all things that we have no right to expect from even the greatest works of art but which we can occasionally derive from them. Still, today, if I hear a record I like it is no longer a signal for me to seek out every other that the artist has made. I take them as they come, love them, and leave them. Some have stuck — a few that come quickly to mind are Neil Young’sAfter the Goldrush, Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions, Van Morrison’s Tupelo Honey, James Taylor’s records, Valerie Simpson’s Exposed, Randy Newman’sSail Away, Exile on Main Street, Ry Cooder’s records, and, very specially, the last three albums of Joni Mitchell — but many more slip through the mind, making much fainter impressions than their counterparts of a decade ago. But tonight there is someone I can write of the way I used to write, without reservations of any kind. Last Thursday, at the Harvard Square theatre, I saw my rock’n'roll past flash before my eyes. And I saw something else: I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen. And on a night when I needed to feel young, he made me feel like I was hearing music for the very first time. When his two-hour set ended I could only think, can anyone really be this good; can anyone say this much to me, can rock’n'roll still speak with this kind of power and glory? And then I felt the sores on my thighs where I had been pounding my hands in time for the entire concert and knew that the answer was yes. Springsteen does it all. He is a rock’n'roll punk, a Latin street poet, a ballet dancer, an actor, a joker, bar band leader, hot-shit rhythm guitar player, extraordinary singer, and a truly great rock’n'roll composer. He leads a band like he has been doing it forever. I racked my brains but simply can’t think of a white artist who does so many things so superbly. There is no one I would rather watch on a stage today. He opened with his fabulous party record “The E Street Shuffle” — but he slowed it down so graphically that it seemed a new song and it worked as well as the old. He took his overpowering story of a suicide, “For You,” and sang it with just piano accompaniment and a voice that rang out to the very last row of the Harvard Square theatre. He did three new songs, all of them street trash rockers, one even with a “Telstar” guitar introduction and an Eddie Cochran rhythm pattern. We missed hearing his “Four Winds Blow,” done to a fare-thee-well at his sensational week-long gig at Charley’s but “Rosalita” never sounded better and “Kitty’s Back,” one of the great contemporary shuffles, rocked me out of my chair, as I personally led the crowd to its feet and kept them there. Bruce Springsteen is a wonder to look at. Skinny, dressed like a reject from Sha Na Na, he parades in front of his all-star rhythm band like a cross between Chuck Berry, early Bob Dylan, and Marlon Brando. Every gesture, every syllable adds something to his ultimate goal — to liberate our spirit while he liberates his by baring his soul through his music. Many try, few succeed, none more than he today.It’s five o’clock now — I write columns like this as fast as I can for fear I’ll chicken out — and I’m listening to “Kitty’s Back.” I do feel old but the record and my memory of the concert has made me feel a little younger. I still feel the spirit and it still moves me. I bought a new home this week and upstairs in the bedroom is a sleeping beauty who understands only too well what I try to do with my records and typewriter. About rock’n'roll, the Lovin’ Spoonful once sang, “I’ll tell you about the magic that will free your soul/But it’s like trying to tell a stranger about rock’n'roll.” Last Thursday, I remembered that the magic still exists and as long as I write about rock, my mission is to tell a stranger about it — just as long as I remember that I’m the stranger I’m writing for. - Jon Landau""Growing Young With Rock and Roll - Jon Landau, 1974". Blogspot. 8 April 2010. Accessed 13 December 2016. Versions Early advance promotional test pressings of Born to Run featured a script cover. "Meeting Across the River" was originally entitled "The Heist" on these pressings. The script cover is considered to be the most desired Bruce album."Bruce Springsteen - Born to Run (Script Cover)". Discogs. 2016. Accessed 13 December 2016. Early commercial pressings had a misprint where Jon Landau's name was incorrectly spelled "John" instead of "Jon". Columbia Records then corrected it by placing a sticker on the back of the record jacket. Some copies, however, do not have the corrective sticker."Bruce Springsteen - Born to Run (Misprint)". Discogs. 2016. Accessed 13 December 2016. In 1983, a Sesame Street parody of Born to Run was released entitled The Great Rock and Roll from Sesame Street: Born to Add, where "Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band" was changed to "Bruce Stringbean and the S. Street Band"."[ http://www.allmusic.com/album/born-to-add-mw0000176221 Born to Add - Sesame Street]". AllMusic. 2016. Accessed 13 December 2016. On November 15, 2005, a 30th anniversary box set of Born to Run was released entitled Born to Run: 30th Anniversary Edition. It included a remastered version of the album on CD with a cardboard case replica of the original gatefold, a 45 page booklet of rare photos, a DVD of the Wings for Wheels: The Making of Born to Run documentary, and the DVD of Hammersmith Odeon London '75 concert that was recorded on November 18, 1975. It was the first full-length concert video to be released of the E Street Band."Bruce Springsteen - Born to Run 30th Anniversary Edition". Discogs. 2016. Accessed 13 December 2016. Personnel * Bruce Springsteen – lead vocals, producer, lead and rhythm guitars, harmonica, percussion * Roy Bittan – piano, Fender Rhodes, organ, harpsichord, glockenspiel, background vocals on all tracks except "Born to Run" * Clarence Clemons – saxophones, tambourine, background vocals * Danny Federici – organ and glockenspiel on "Born to Run" * Garry W. Tallent – bass guitar * Max Weinberg – drums on all tracks except "Born to Run" * Ernest "Boom" Carter – drums on "Born to Run" * Suki Lahav - violin on "Jungleland" * David Sancious – piano, organ on "Born to Run" * Steven Van Zandt – guitar, background vocals, horn arrangements * Wayne Andre – trombone * Mike Appel – background vocals * Michael Brecker – tenor saxophone * Randy Brecker – trumpet, flugelhorn * Richard Davis – double bass on "Meeting Across The River" * David Sanborn – baritone saxophone * Charles Calello – conductor, string arrangements * Jon Landau - producer * Mike Appel- producer * Greg Calbi – mastering * Bob Ludwig – remastering * Andy Abrams – engineer * Angie Arcuri – engineer * Ricky Delena – engineer * Jimmy Iovine – engineer * Louis Lahav – engineer * Thom Panunzio – engineer * Corky Stasiak – engineer * David Thoener – engineer * John Berg – album design * Andy Engel – album design * Eric Meola – photography References Category:Albums Category:Videos Category:Box sets